Home | Management

Art | Books | Communication | Entrepreneurship | Events | General | Innovation & Creativity | Management | Organisational Culture | Science | Society | Strategy | Technology |

21.06.10

ZukunftWissen "Innovating Innovation" | Leitartikel Juni

Frank Piller und Dennis Hilgers haben auf Innovating Innovation den Leitartikel für dieses Monat beigesteuert:

Government 2.0: Impulse für eine Reform des öffentlichen Sektors durch Open Innovation
Neue Ansätze des Innovationsmanagements belegen, dass der Innovationsprozess von Produkten und (Dienst-) Leistungen nicht mehr geschlossen und zwingend innerhalb der unternehmerischen Grenzen stattfinden muss. Das Innovationspotenzial von Firmen hängt im zunehmenden Maße von externem Wissen ab und somit von Umfang und Intensität der Interaktionsbeziehung mit externen Beitragenden. Die systematische Integration bspw. von Kunden und Nutzern in den Entwicklungsprozess trägt entscheidend zur effizienten Gestaltung von Produkten bei, da so zielgenau Kundenbedürfnisse identifiziert und umgesetzt werden können. Begriffe wie Co-Creation, Mass Customization, Interaktive Wertschöpfung oder Open Innovation stehen dabei in Wissenschaft, aber auch in der Praxis für den zunehmenden Erfolg neuer (vor allem internetbasierter) Praktiken und stellvertretend für die Erkenntnis, dass die breite Öffentlichkeit eine Quelle für gesteigerte Innovationskraft und damit für gesteigerten Unternehmenswert darstellen kann. …

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

7.06.10

Workshop: Designing Innovation

Wir haben noch zwei Restplätze für folgenden Workshop Ende dieses Monat. Bei Interesse bitte rasch eine E-Mail an Fr. Loose, loose@ieb.net schicken.

Innovation bedeutet, das Unplanbare planvoll zu adressieren. Diese Aufgabe kollidiert mit den Routinen von Unternehmen und Organisationen. In Gestaltungsprozessen ist der Umgang mit Unsicherheit und ergebnisoffenes Handeln jedoch die Regel. Daher können gestalterische Methoden und Haltungen als „DesignThinking” in viele Bereiche übertragen werden, wo die Fähigkeit zur Innovation über die Zukunftsfähig- keit entscheidet.

Ziel ist die Ermöglichung radikaler Innovation, die grundsätzlich neue Perspektiven für die strategische Ausrichtung von Organisationen, sowie neue Produkte und Services erzeugt. Im Kontext der Dynamisierung durch digitale Medien kommen zusätzliche Aspekte wie soziales Kapital und emergente Prozesse hinzu.

Vorgestellt werden Methoden wie Enabling Spaces, Scope and Drill-down, Cultural Probes, Re-framing, attitude - practise - knowledge, Blue Print Maps und People Studies. Anhand von Übungen und Fallbeispielen werden unterschiedliche Ziele und Qualitäten von Innova- tionsarbeit diskutiert und exemplarisch vertieft.

Angesprochen sind Projektmanager und Organisationsentwickler mit Berufserfahrung. Vorausgesetzt wird die Bereitschaft, sich auf ungewohnte Situationen und Gruppenarbeit einzulassen, um das persönliche Repertoire zu erweitern und zu stärken.

Facts:
Designing Innovation - Gestalterische Methoden und Haltungen für Innovation und Wissensgenerierung
am 25. und 26. Juni 2010
im IEB, Hardenbergstraße 9A, 10623 Berlin.

Detailliertes Programm

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

25.05.10

ZukunftWissen "Innovating Innovation" | Leitartikel Mai

Christian Stary hat auf Innovating Innovation den Leitartikel für dieses Monat beigesteuert:

“Kreative Ökonomie” braucht Lernende Organisationen
In jüngster Zeit dreht sich alles darum, was wir aus der Finanz- und der damit einhergehenden Wirtschaftskrise lernen. Kommt es zur “Kreativen Ökonomie”, wie es Matthias Horx im aktuellen Trendreport darlegt, dann braucht es eine Neuordnung des Wirkens bzw. Zusammenwirkens von Organisationen und Akteuren aller Gesellschaftssysteme. Seiner Ansicht nach wird sich ein neuer Kooperationsmodus zwischen Markt, Individuum, Staat und Zivilgesellschaft herausbilden. Zentrales Merkmal dieser neuen Form des Zusammenwirkens werden Rückkoppelungsbeziehungen darstellen, welche die Ordnung und Qualität von Interaktionen bestimmen. …

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

26.04.10

Dossier auf ZukunftWissen "Innovating Innovation"

Seit einigen Monaten bespielen wir die Plattform ZukunftWissen der Austria Presse Agentur. Das Special Feature Innovating Innovation - wie kommt das Neue in die Welt? soll Lust auf das Neue machen, sowie Innovation neu denken, um überraschende Denkanstöße und Einsichten zu erhalten (weiterlesen). Getragen wird das Dossier von monatlich erscheinenden Leitartikeln. Letzte Woche ging der Artikel von Florian Brody online und ergänzt gut die bisher erschienen Beiträge (Ernst von Glasersfeld, Alexander Riegler, Markus Peschl, Robert Bauer und Thomas Fundneider).

THEMA | Innovation ist eine Frage der “rechten” Einstellung - Von Florian Brody
Wien/San Francisco (APA-ZukunftWissen) - Es fehlt an Innovation. Wir brauchen mehr Innovation. Jemand muss da dringend etwas machen. Das unbestimmte Gefühl, technologisch, gesellschaftlich aber auch individuell auf der Stelle zu treten und Existierendes zu replizieren statt Neues zu schaffen, lässt sich auch bestätigen. Statistische Auswertungen und fundierte Analysen von Produktionsprozessen lassen nachweisen, dass Innovation im Argen liegt. Entwicklungen im Umwelt- und Energiebereich, der medizinischen Forschung oder der Raumfahrt kommen nicht so schnell voran, wie wir es uns letztes Jahrhundert erhofft und vorgestellt hatten …

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

25.03.10

Wissensmanagement, Wissenstransfer, Wissensnetzwerke

Herzlichen Glückwunsch an Richard Pircher, ein sehr interessantes Buch zum Thema Wissensmanagement kompiliert zu haben. Wir sind mit einem Beitrag zum Feld Innovation und Wissensgenerierung vertreten: “Emergente Innovation - die Ermöglichung der Hervorbringung des radikal Neuen in Enabling Spaces”.

Dieses Buch fasst den Stand von Wissensmanagement praxisorientiert zusammen; es richtet sich an Führungskräfte aus kleinen, mittleren und großen Unternehmen oder Non-Profit-Organisationen sowie an alle anderen Personen, die sich mit wissensorientiertem Management befassen, zum Beispiel aus den Bereichen HR, F&E, IT, Marketing oder Verwaltung und Controlling. Kompakte Beiträge - geschrieben aus Sicht der Unternehmen - bieten jeweils einen Überblick über die Themen- gebiete Wissensmanagement, Wissenstransfer, Wissenssicherung, effek- tives Auffinden von Wissen und Wissenscontrolling/Wissensbilanz. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt liegt in der Darstellung von Querbeziehungen zu verwandten Managementansätzen wie Qualitäts- oder Prozessmanage- ment, soziale Netzwerke, Innovation und ethisches Management.


Fallbeispiele zeigen beispielsweise auf, wie der Wissensabfluss durch Pensionierungen oder Kündigungen reduziert werden kann, welcher Prozess die effektive Weitergabe von Erfahrungswissen unterstützt, wie Wissen für die Organisation in einem Wiki gesichert wird, wie vorhandenes Wissen schnell aufgefunden werden kann, wie die Heraus- forderungen durch das Internet beantwortet werden können oder wie eine Wissensbilanz die Entwicklung des intellektuellen Kapitals einer Organisation misst. Dabei werden auch Aspekte wie das Überwinden von Hürden, erzielter Nutzen, Begleitmaßnahmen und Folgeschritte behandelt.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

24.02.10

Enable!

Final day for the early bird fee

ZukunftWissen published an article in German about the conference.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

17.02.10

Enable! Konferenz im Bankenumfeld

Das finde ich ja wirklich interessant. Die Konferenz Enable! ist auf der ersten Seite eines Portals für Finanzwirtschaft. Hat die harte Finanzwelt die weichen Faktoren entdeckt? Ich denke, diese Unterscheidung ist auch längst obsolet, denn gerade Konzepte wie Enabling sind längst nicht mehr ein interessantes Add-on (sozusagen, erst etwas “Gescheites” lernen und dann, wenn noch Zeit übrig bleibt, können wir uns ja mit diesen Dingen beschäftigen), sondern wird im zunehmenden Maße die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Organisationen bestimmen. Diejenigen Unternehmen, die Personen mit hohen Kompetenzen in nicht-linearem Denken, Fähigkeiten zur Abduktion, zu Entscheidungsfindungen in hoch-komplexen und schnell verändernden Umwelten etc. begeistern können, werden in Zukunft hard-core Analytiker überlegen sein.

Daher vielleicht gar nicht so unpassend der Konnex Enabling und Banking!

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

10.11.09

Roger Martin on the Design of Business

Roger Martin von der Rotman School of Management in einem Gespräch über analytisches und intuitives Problemlösen:

The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it’s become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers. New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called it abductive logic. It’s a logical leap of the mind that you can’t prove from past data.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

24.09.09

Netflix Award

Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.

The BellKor team won the $1 Million Prize. The last days were exciting, since the last 30-days (when the BellKor team announced that it had reached the targeted improvement rate) new team emerged trying to beat the BellKor team. More on this in The New York Times.

I still believe in the power of such crowdsourcing processes. However, companies must not mistake such initiatives with marketing fakery (just today I read in this context: Wie man die Nutzer zum Innovationsmotor heranzieht). Too many enthusiasts have been disappointed. Rightly. In the majority of cases, the most difficult part is the internal commitment. Otherwise, one division organises such a process, and after that the whole thing is dead. This does more damage to a company than not engaging in crowdsourcing at all.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

30.07.09

Disruptive Innovation

Already published in 2008, this is nevertheless a worthwhile podcast: Scott Anthony of Innosight speaks about disruptive innovation. Key points are in line with our thinking.

It is not about doing it better, it is about doing it differently (and thereby tranfering existing markets or creating new ones). I am also convinced that disruptive innovation does not mean requiring a lot of resources. Maybe in a later phase, but certainly not at the beginning of a “project”.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

23.07.09

Social Media & Marketing

Interesting interview with Michael Stelzner on FastCompany about How to Use Social Media to Generate Buzz for Your Event.

What I did is I contacted the executive team and in a matter of 24 hours, we had the survey written. We all jointly helped promote it and in about 10 days, we got about 800 to 900 people that filled out the survey, which was very content-rich, answering questions that frankly had never been answered in the social media world before.

As always, think about content first. The report can be dowloaded.

You may wish to leave a comment or leave a trackback from your own site.

1.02.09

Designing Chaos

An old, but still absorbing story about the TBWA Chiat/Day advertising agency which former boss Jay Chiat completly redesigned, but failed. From the Wired-article from 1999:

Before long, there was a beeline for the only vestiges of a conventional workplace - the enclosed “project rooms.” In LA and, later, in the New York virtual office, these rooms had been designated for clients, or agency groups working for a particular client. But in the frantic attempts to escape from open space, nobody much cared who they were designated for. “The rooms would quickly fill up with people,” says freelance copywriter Paul Spencer, “and then they’d say to everyone else, ‘Get out - this is mine!

It was a high crime to leave any stuff in the project rooms, or on the tables out on the open floor, or anywhere. But since the lockers were too small to hold much more than personal mementos, people began to lug armfuls of stuff - important papers, contracts, storyboards - as they slogged through the space. (Monika Miller, at least, still had her wagon; who was laughing now?) People started hiding their stuff in corners. And then they’d forget where they’d hidden it. “Every day,” says Miller, “there’d be these frantic email messages like, ‘Has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where my files are?

They’d dart in at six in the morning, grab equipment, hide it somewhere, and maybe catch a couple more hours’ sleep before the virtual workday began. This didn’t sit well with Rabosky and others: “Damned if I was going to get up at six in the morning to get a phone,” he says. “I had to put my foot down. I told my assistant, ‘Go in there at six in the morning, get me a phone and computer, and hide it till I get there.

Creative directors couldn’t find their copywriters. Calls to portable phones were answered by voicemail; by the time the calls were returned, the original inspiration had passed. Even if people were in the office, “the simple processes of finding a human being were gone,” Cooke says. “Where would an art director be? One wouldn’t know. I can remember coming back from a presentation and being unable to find my creative department for two days.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.09.08

10 Jahre Wissensbilanz

Proponenten der (österreichischen) Wissensbilanz treffen sich am 30. September 2008 in der Akademie der Wissenschaften, um ein 10-jähriges Jubiläum zu feiern. Es gibt sicherlich noch einiges zu tun & zu verbessern, um die gewünschte Verbreitung zu erreichen. Ich erinnere mich noch an die Abschlussworte einer Konferenz zu dem Thema vor ca. 2 Jahren von Baruch Lev, der meinte, dass die Wissensbilanz in den USA an Bedeutung verloren hat. Gerade deshalb, alles Gute!

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.07.08

Visiting Google Zürich

Last week I spent a highly interesting day at the Google Labs in Zürich. The architect and designer responsible for the recently opened Google complex, Stefan Camenzind, gave us a detailed insight in the design of the offices and spaces.

What really fascinated me was not so much the concrete manifestations of the objects (informal meeting rooms, open offices, relaxation areas etc), but rather how it come to these realisations. The guiding vision or values that had to be translated into tangible outcomes. This thinking has many overlaps with our developed framework of emergent innovation, especially with the concept of enabling spaces, what was also the reason for the visit. Together with Markus Peschl, I am currently working on a framework that can structure the elements and approaches of designing such enabling spaces (in the context of innovation, or more generally, in the creation of new knowledge). The following dimensions will be translated into concrete guidlines for the creation of enabling spaces:

• physical/architecture
• technological
• cognitive
• neuronale
• emotional
• intellectual
• social
• cultural
• inter-cultural

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

28.01.08

Customer satisfaction at the heart of value generation

37signals reflect on Amazon’s obsession with customers. It is really amazing what the company takes as granted in the name of superb customer satisfaction:

The Amazon customer service guy didn’t blink. After assuring himself that I had never actually touched or seen the PlayStation, he had a replacement on the way before the day was out. It arrived on Christmas Eve. Amazon didn’t even charge me for the shipping. My son was very happy. So, of course, was I.

Some months ago, I ordered several books via amazon’s website and to my surprise, I saw a charge on my credit card account for an item named AMZ*Prime Club. After some research, I figured out that I seemingly became a member of amazon’s prime club what I didn’t choose (or at least not explicitly). In different blog entries I read that there were several other surprised and angry customers, feeling that they were ripped off by amazon. However, after complaining about this issue, amazon reacted quickly and transfered the money back on my account. I am still using amazon’s offerings.

It it is obvious that Jeff Bezo regards customer satisfaction as a building block for his company’s success. It is not a PR-gag. It has filtrated through the entire company and from my experience, this process takes a long time.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

1.06.07

Thesen für die Wirtschaft von Morgen

Z_punkt hat 15 Thesen für die Wirtschaft von Morgen formuliert. These 15 sehe ich ähnlich, These 1 sehe ich anders.

These 15: Innovation heißt Selbstreflexion und kultureller Wandel. Wir brauchen ein Gemeinwesen, das Innovationskultur lebt — und auch das Scheitern kultiviert.

These 1: Es gibt keine globale Wirtschaft. Regionen sind die ökonomischen Machtzentren und Erfolge erzielt man nur auf lokalen Märkten.

Wie bereits als Kommentar bei Irving Wladawsky-Berger gepostet, ignorieren (vor allem kleinere) Unternehmen, die hauptsächlich national agieren, oft globale Einflüsse. Die Entscheidung, sich vornehmlich auf dem heimischen Markt zu konzentrieren, hält jedoch nicht Konkurrenten - die am globalen Markt agieren - ab, ebenfalls diesen Markt zu bearbeiten. Daher agieren gewissermaßen alle Unternehmen (außer sie besetzen eine Nische) in einer globalen Wirtschaft, und wenn diese ignoriert wird, dann kommt diese zu ihnen.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

23.03.07

Interview with Bill Campbell

The real point is that engineers should have the ability to say, “This is what we want to do, and all the product managers in the world aren’t going to talk us out of this.” Later, when we started doing a lot of banking, we hired some product managers with bank experience. One day, one of them comes to a meeting that included me and banking engineers and says, “I want these features.” And I replied, “If you ever tell an engineer what features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You’re going to tell the engineers what problem the consumer has. And then the engineers are going to provide you with a way better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them to put some dopey feature in there.

About Bill Campbell

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

6.02.07

Appealing offices

Article on npr with useful links to further resources about the positive effects of good office design. In Austria, bene is very innovative in equipping offices with flexible solutions. According to an architect, they re-design huge offices over the weekend in London. One can really feel the contrast between a typical office design and one that is appealing:

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

5.02.07

Design thinking in Business

As the attentive reader might have witnessed (see here, or here or here), I am engaged in business design for quite some time now. Recently, I stumbled across a blog written by Alex Osterwalder who also seems quite interested in this issue (and not to forget Ralf Beuker).

In a recent entry, Alex writes about some specific characteristics of the designer resp. the design process. His list is very similar to the statements made by an architect I interviewed last week. He told me about a tendering procedure for a casino in the US and how he started to solve the difficulty between formulating the written guidelines for the tender and allowing enough flexibility to receive diverse projects. I think one major difference between business people and designers (besides those that have been mentioned) is the detail vs. overview approach. Designers and artists in general start with an outline (this reminds me on an interview with the musician Falco who said that he sees many similarities between his approach to composing and an artist’s approach to painting). Namely, to start with an outline and then work on the details. Since I am confronted regularly with business/project ideas, I can say that many business descriptions focus far too much on the details. Architects/designers usually start with a broad outline, then focus on some details, re-outline the entire object according to feedback and at the same time handle the input of many different stakeholders. So, this is also what business leaders can learn from them, since they often have to:

- deal with complexity
- reconcile a variety of different demands
- understand the basic priniples of their business, but often don’t need to know every detail (as an architect needs to know basically the interfaces but not the technical specs of steel beams etc)
- be able to listen to outside comments and incorporate these in revised plans/assumptions

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.01.07

Thomas Leif

Thomas Leif war letzte Woche zu Gast bei einer Sendung im Ö1 und hat über die Beraterbranche gesprochen (aufbauend auf seinem Buch Beraten und verkauft). Starke Prügel für die großen Beratungshäuser wie McKinsey und Roland Berger.

Sehr positiv sprach Leif hingegen über spezialisierte (meist kleine) Berater, die sich mit den speziellen Anforderungen und Herausforderungen der Kunden auseinandersetzen, und nicht jedesmal nach Schema-F vorgehen. Um die “ganz gewöhnlichen Arbeiternehmer” in Beratungsprozessen zu berücksichtigen/integrieren, schlägt Leif vor, eine offene Unternehmenskultur zu fördern, die Innovations- und Wissensmanagement hervorbringt (tf consulting hat sich auf Innovationsmanagement spezialisiert).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

14.01.07

Tipping points

Lesenswerter Artikel in der Zeit über unser Klima bzw. dessen Wandel. Interessant fand ich die Erwähnung von tipping points. Der Autor schreibt:

… das Abschmelzen des grönländischen Eisschildes, das den Meeresspiegel um mehrere Meter ansteigen ließe. Das Auftauen des sibirischen Permafrostbodens, wodurch riesige Mengen des Treibhausgases Methan freigesetzt würden. Selbst der Regenwald am Amazonas könnte zum Klima-Turbo werden — dann nämlich, wenn er, mangels Regens, eingeht. Jedes Zehntelgrad zusätzlicher Erwärmung vergrößert die Gefahr. Werden die Kippschalter betätigt, wird die Erde jedenfalls vollkommen anders aussehen, als wir sie kennen.

Der Ausdruck Tipping Point stammt von Morton Grodzins, der in den 60er Jahren das fluchtartige Verlassen der weißen Bevölkerungsschicht beobachtete, wenn der Anteil von Schwarzen zu hoch wurde. In der Komplexitätstheorie werden Tipping Points für das Aussterben von Tierarten zur Erklärung verwendet.

Es ist schwer zu erklären, dass Tipping Points nicht einer linearen Logik verlaufen. Einige wenige Grad mehr im Jahresschnitt, dann noch ein Zehntel im nächsten und plötzlich wird das System instabil und der Ausgang kann nicht vorhergesagt werden. Wann dieser Tipping Point jedoch erreicht wird, ist unbekannt.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

LEGO Bausteine

Lego hat Mitte der 90er Jahre mit Unterstützung von Johan Roos und Bart Victor (laut Wikepedia) das Programm LEGO Serious Play entwickelt. Die Bausteine und die dazugehörige Methodik sollen bei diversen Management-Aufgabenstellungen unterstützen, so z.B. bei Stategiefragen, Veränderungsmanagement und Organisationskultur. Gekauft können diese speziellen Sets jedoch nicht, sondern es muss ein Lizenzvereinbarung mit Lego abgeschlossen werden. Zudem muss zumindest ein Berater (das ist nämlich die Zielgruppe) ein 5-tägiges Training absolvieren. Lego begründet dies damit, dass

The five day program is necessary to gain an understanding the vast application possibilities, and particularly to ensure that the facilitators carry out high value and high quality work shops.

Eigenartig, da soll mit Hilfe einer Kreativitätstechnik (Einsatz von Lego Bausteinen, mit denen metaphorische 3D-Modelle die Situation von Organisationen veranschaulicht sollen, um so zu einem besseren Verständnis und/oder zu möglichen neuen Lösungen zu gelangen) eine spielerische Herangehensweise vermittelt werden. Auf der anderen Seite, wird vorgegeben, wie dieser Vorgang auszusehen hat. Also Kreativität ja, aber bitte nur nach unserer Sichtweise. Ich finde die Lego-Idee ja grundsätzlich sehr gut, jedoch sollte den Beratern zugetraut werden, dass sie mit dem Baukasten selber umgehen können.*

*Mir ist schon klar, dass die Realität oft anders aussieht, wenn man den vielen Beratern zusieht, wie sie sich kramphaft an ausgearbeiteten Methoden klammern (und diese auch nicht verlassen, wenn sie eigentlich adaptiert gehören).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

11.01.07

Betriebsklima

Im Standard:

Viele Unternehmen meinen, dass ein hohes Gehalt und ein flotter Dienstwagen genügen, um die besten Mitarbeiter vom Arbeitsmarkt zu gewinnen. Die Personalberatung Neumann International hat im Rahmen einer internationalen Studie in Deutschland und Zentral- und Osteuropa untersucht, worauf Kandidaten bei ihrer beruflichen Neuorientierung tatsächlich Wert legen. Betriebsklima ist wichtigster Faktor An vorderster Stelle rangiert das Betriebsklima, das unter Beschäftigten aller Altersstufen die größte Rolle für die Entscheidung spielt, den Arbeitsplatz zu wechseln. Über 70 % der Befragten bewerteten dieses Kriterium für ihre nächste Karriereentscheidung mit dem Maximalwert.

Interessant, dass dennoch viele Unternehmen nicht viel für tun, um ein gutes Betriebsklima zu entwickeln. Immer noch zu soft?

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

6.12.06

Innovieren oder optimieren

Dilbert Comic über Six Sigma und Innovation. Nett.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

24.11.06

Massenproduktivität & Individualität

So der Titel der 2. Veranstaltung des designforumsMQ zur Symposiumsreihe “Zukunftsperspektiven im Design. Frank Pillar (MIT) hielt einen sehr interessanten Vortrag zum Thema “Open Innvoation/Crowd Sourcing/Mass Customization/etc”. Abseits der bekannten Beispiele zu diesem Thema, wie Threadless (bzw. Spreadshirt, die jedoch nur Text oder Bilder auf das T-Shirt drucken, aber keinen Reviewprozess eingerichtet haben und Look-Zippy, die das Geschäftsmodell von Threadless noch verfeinert haben - kein Verkaufsrisiko, da alle Bestellungen zu einem Stichtag abgegeben werden müssen, danach kann nicht nachbestellt werden) oder Lego hat Pillar weitere interessante Geschäftsmodelle zum Thema Open Innovation vorgestellt.

Factory121:
Die eigene Uhr entwerfen. Aufbauend auf Vorgaben.

Dolzer
Maßhemden und -anzüge online konfigurieren und bestellen. Gibt es in Österreich auch, un zwar die Firma Hemdenmacher.

rapidobject
Online 3D-Modelle anschauen, kaufen, verkaufen und verwalten.

eMachineShop
Mit CAD-Modellen als Vorlage, werden individuelle Metallobjekte gefräst und verschickt. Z.B. als Verknüpfung zum Open Design von Ronen Kadushin.

Edelwiser
Die Oberfläche (Graphik) des Skis selber designen.

In einer anschließenden Podiumsdiskussion (mit Nikolaus Franke (WU Wien) und Karl Berger (bene)) wurde auch über die Grenzen und Umsetzungsschwierigkeiten diskutiert. Karl Berger erwähnte den CEO eines deutschen Küchenherstellers, der meinte, wenn Leute sich ihre Küchenfronten selber designen, dann endet das oft in einem totalen Fiasko (z.B. Palmen, Meer, etc), und fällt letztendlich auf das Unternehmen zurück (Küchenumtausch nach 2 Wochen?).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

10.11.06

The Cost of Knowledge

Al Jacobson and Laurence Prusak write in the HBR about the cost of knowledge management/searching. While they acknowledge that efforts to enhance systems to better search for information have been valuable, they argue that “future payoffs will depend less on enhancing systems that track down information than on devising strategies to help employees use what they’ve found.”

In their study, the authors asked more than 200 knowledge workers in different industries to log their activities. Surprisingly (for the authors), most time was spent on “adapting knowledge gained (46%)”, then comes “eliciting knowledge from experts (38%)”, and only then comes “searching for knowledge (10%)” - the rest goes to “scheduling meetings with experts”. However, I don’t find this result so surprising. Applying information/knowledge is the difficult part.

Further, the short article deduces “This surprising finding suggests, first, that IT investments in search technologies appear to be working and that additional investments of the same kind are likely to yield only marginal benefits.” I would doubt this. If you look at developments within semantic technologies - aside, if they ever will reach a breakthrough - the main aim is not so much on searching information (in my point of view), but to allow the system to identify and suggest novel relationships which can lead to new perspectives and new ways of thinking/doing things.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

3.10.06

D-Schools and B-Schools

A recent article in the BusinessWeek illustrates examples of a design-approach towards innovation. I personally think that designers offer great value to the innovation process. But not only to innovation, also strategy can benefit from an approach that is dialogue-based, issue-driven and permanently adapts to the fast changing environment. For this reason, tf consulting named his strategy unit “strategy design”.

A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

A while ago, I posted an article by Jeanne Liedtka, who sees design as the new metaphor for strategy. Not by surprise, Liedtka works at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, one of the leading D-Schools mentioned in the BW-article.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.09.06

Unternehmenskultur als kritischer Erfolgsfaktor für die Innovationsfähigkeit eines Unternehmens

Veröffentlichung eines Beitrages in der Zeitschrift InnovationSPIRIT von tf consulting: Teil 1, Teil 2.

Teaser:
Trotz eines Bewusstseins über die Bedeutung von Innovationen für Unternehmen, schafft es der Großteil nicht, erfolgreich Innovationen hervorzubringen. Ist daher die Sicht von Peter Drucker falsch, der feststellte, dass Innovationen gelernt und praktiziert werden können? Der Autor glaubt dies nicht. Um Innovationen zu ermöglichen, bedarf es neben einer stringenten Strategie und intelligenter Prozesse, einer Unternehmenskultur, in der die Innovationsfähigkeit eines Unternehmens eingebettet ist. Und erfolgreiche Veränderungen an der Unternehmenskultur sind langfristige Prozesse, die ein engagiertes und umsetzungsorientiertes Management voraussetzen.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

6.06.06

Open letter to the top executives

Although I don’t agree with all the issues raised in the post (or more precisely, I would have included other issues and dropped some of the mentioned), it is a good reading. However, topic number one I fully support:

Don’t spend millions of dollars to try and change your culture. Corporate culture is a natural thing that cannot be manufactured. No amount of posters, incentive programs, PowerPoint presentations or slogans on websites will affect the hearts and minds of your employees. If you want to see things change immediately, stop acting like an asshole. If you see one of your senior managers acting like an asshole, ask him to stop. If he doesn’t stop, fire him. You will be amazed at how fast the culture shifts.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

1.06.06

Nachhaltige Wertschöpfung

Das ADVANCE-Projekt (Kofinanziert von der EU) bewertet die Umweltleistung von 65 europäischen Industrieunternehmen mit dem sogenannten ‘Sustainable Value’ Ansatz. Dieser Sustainable Value Wert vergleicht einen Ressourceneinsatz (Kohledioxid, Stickoxid, Schweloxid, VOCs, Abfallerzeugung und Wassereinsatz) mit einem Benchmarkwert (EU-15 Durchschnitt).

Es werden somit alle Industrien über die gleichen Ressourceneinsätze verglichen. Konsequenterweise, ist das Ergebnis auch dementsprechend Industriespezifisch. Kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass dieser Ansatz auch über das Forschungsprojekt hinaus Anwendung findet.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

14.03.06

Innovation at Whirlpool

Nancy T. Snyder has been interviewed by Business Week where she speaks about how she managed the task to position big-ticket appliances manufacturer Whirlpool No. 1 in innovation. Also highly valuable, her remarks on what didn’t went well during the 6 years.

Some important lessons distilled from the interview and augmented with my own experience:
- Innovative organisations are different: I remember an article about the most innovative organisation in the US. Gore won it. From the article: ’Gore is a strikingly contradictory company: a place where nerds can be mavericks; a place that’s impatient with the standard way of working, but more than patient with nurturing ideas and giving them time to flourish; a place that’s humble in its origins, yet ravenous for breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, growth. Gore’s uniqueness comes from being as innovative in its operating principles as it is in its diverse product lines. This is a company that has kicked over the rules that most other organizations live by.’
And an employee recalls: ’I came from a very traditional male-dominated business — the men’s shoe business,” she recalls. “When I arrived at Gore, I didn’t know who did what. I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy.” Like all new hires, Davidson was given a “starting sponsor” at Gore — a mentor, not a boss. But she didn’t know how to work without someone telling her what to do.’

- Difficulty to measure (success for intance): The important aspect here is to find the right balance between flexibility and consistency. Be receptive of developed measures that don’t work (either because they don’t measure the right thing or because employees don’t report them) and permantely improve the devised measures. However, be consistent with core measures to allow for benchmarking. This process requires time, so don’t expect to hit the right measures with the first development.

- Define what innovation means for your company: from the interview: ’So just like the learning journey on metrics, we had a learning journey on how you describe innovation. An idea had to meet three criteria to be innovative: It had to create a competitive advantage. It had to be unique and differentiating. And it had to create shareholder value. We worked with those definitions for three years, and then we realized they weren’t quite right. It’s hard for any one thing to create a competitive advantage by itself and be sustainable. You have to stay ahead of the competition. If you have a cadence of innovations that keeps a product fresh and always improving — a migration path — that makes it sustainable. So now we say if we’re going to put any money in an innovation project, it has to sit on a migration path, it has to be something that the customer really wants, and it’s got to return an above-average profit.’

- Communicate innovation throughout the organisation: The CEO need to go out and talk to people, especially trained employees can act as advocates or facilitators and IT-systems need to support the exchange of ideas and information.

- Design a smart reward system: Tie a substantial portion of senior executives’ pay to the outcomes of the innovation pipeline, while putting the focus for non-senior executives on recognition by their peers. From the interview: ’A third of your pay, if you’re a senior leader, is tied directly to what comes out of the innovation pipeline. And that’s been in place for three years. That was a tipping point for us on innovation.’

- Manage change: Do not focus only on the hard issues such as power structures, systems and finance. Addressing organisational culture, the organisation’s paradigm, stories and symbols is at least as important.

- Adapt the organisational structure, its systems and its culture: For example, devise an effective and efficient budgeting process that matches with the same flexibility that innovation requires. Make innovation a concern for all employees (and not linked to a department). Fostering innovation is not a one-shot deal, it needs permanent attention. And many more aspects.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

13.03.06

Key success factors for Knowledge Management

Mark from anectode posted the outcome of an presentation and meeting with Karl-Eric Sveiby, where he listed five points as being, in descending order, the things offering the highest value potential in KM:

1. Align KM with business strategy — a knowledge-based strategy
2. Improve climate for knowledge creation and sharing — collaborative climate
3. Improve knowledge sharing with clients
4. Invest in internet-based communication
5. Build organisation for content management (on-line library, databases)

His slide then changed to show where the most money was spent in KM. And you guessed it…. it is the exact opposite from the list above. So most money is spent on item 5, and least money on item 1.

This may not be surprinsing for one who works in this field, however, it is a suitable reminder for starting with the most important topics first.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

20.02.06

Exploiting the power of analogy

This is Gary Hamel’s advise for mangement innovation to become successful. In the February issue of the Harvard Business Review, Hamel focuses in his article on the importance of mangement innovation. He argues ’Over the past 100 years, management innovation, more than any other kind of innovation, has allowed companies to cross new performance thresholds.’ Importantly, Hamel defines management innovation as ’a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices or a departure from customary organisational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed.’

The above mentioned statement is one out of four elements, Hamel suggests to make management innovation a systematic process. Since many management problems arise from the difficulty in communicating abstract topics (vision, strategy, purpose, branding, knowledge management etc), building and exploiting the power of analogy can be a highly valuable approach. Hamel uses an example that I find especially interesting (also for other purposes, such as idea management or the innovation pipeline): bookies (bookmakers)
Create a market for judgement that harness the wisdom of a broad cross section of employees. An executive sponsor would set the initial odds for a project to achieve a particular rate of return within a specific time frame.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

16.01.06

Valueing Companies

Good article about the imprecise art of valueing stocks. Stumbled upon here (a colleague from the OUBS).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

12.01.06

Innovation Excellence

Arthur D. Little investigated in a study, which focuses on how companies worldwide improve profitability and growth through effective innovation management. From the announcement:

According to the study, innovation excellence can boost profit (EBIT) margins by 4 percentage points from 15 to 19%. However companies struggle to get innovation management right. The 25% best innovators are still getting 10 times more output (new products, services etc) than the 25% worst innovators!

If you follow the recent discussions about outsourcing (especially India and China) and competitiveness of regions/countries, one of the arguments is that innovation and creativity is one of the main competitive differentiators in future for Europe. So getting this right is not a nice add-on, but crucially important. In my point of view (see also what I have written on innovation recently), the difficulty with innovation management is that every organisation needs a different approach. Consequently, there is not one standard approach or solution. This is different from let’s say ERP or CRM, where you can find much more common activity chains. I am convinced that getting innovation right is one of the most challenging tasks companies will have to tackle.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

10.01.06

R&D activities influence long-term performance and IPOs

Last year I met Baruch Lev from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business (New York) for the first time and I was very impressed by his personal style and clear thinking. For me, he is one of the most influential academics in the field of management/reporting/&measurement of intangible assets. Besides that, he is one of the few who actually leaves his academic environment and joins forces with business consultants and business leaders. His contributions to the ’soft’ issue of intangibles is almost always grounded on rigour research and figures.

In a recent paper Baruch (together with Re-Jin Guo and Charles Shi) examined the effect of R&D intensity on IPO and long-term corporate performance. The results show a short-term underpricing and a long-term underperformance of IPOs. In their study the authors provide direct evidence that the uncertainty and risk of R&D mitigate investor optimism at IPO.

In other words, investors are overconfident with low R&D issuers, while being highly cautious with issuers showin high R&D activities. Since the positive effects of R&D will have a time lag, those high R&D IPOs exhibit a better performance in the long term than low or non R&D issuers.

A crucial topic the authors also examined is the effect of disclosure of information on the valuation of a company. The authors state: ’We accordingly document the link between information disclosure about R&D (reducing asymmetry) and IPO underpricing by comparing the underpricing associated with pharmaceutical and biotech IPOs—companies that uniformly disclose extensive information about the nature of R&D (success of products under development and prospective outcomes)— with the underpricing of other R&D-intensive issuers that disclose considerably less information on their R&D activities. We find that pharmaceutical and biotech IPO underpricing, despite the generally high uncertainty associated with drug development, is substantially lower than the underpricing of other R&D intensive issues. Thus, enhanced disclosure about the nature of R&D activities and prospective outcomes reduces information asymmetry and is thus rewarded by diminished underpricing.’

This comes back to the value of intellectual capital reporting. It creates not only internal value (learning, knowledge generation, communication, strategic puropose, core capabilities etc) but also external value.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

14.12.05

Managment theory as design science

Joan E. van Aken (from the Eindhoven University of Technology) argues about differences of explanatory sciences (which lead to organization theory) and design sciences (which lead to management theory). In his own words: ’The ultimate mission is to develop design knowledge,i.e.knowledge that can be used in designing solutions to problems in the field in question.It is important to teach a civil engineer subjects like physics and mechanics, but in designing a bridge he or she needs the design knowledge developed by his or her discipline, like for instance the properties of different types of bridges.’ Therefore, the goal is less on problem identification, but rather focused on solutions. In my view, this must also be the aim of consultants. Organisations invest time and effort to solve problems. They expect a way forward (if the problem is solvable than it should be solved, if it is unsolvable (complex situations) than it should be made manageable).

A while ago, I wrote about Liedtka’s approach to strategy as design. Although she argues from a very different starting point, there are many similar approaches to the design paradigm in management.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

5.12.05

Spare time innovators

One of the key success factors (in my experience) with organisational change initiatives is to limit additional effort for all involved to an absolute minimum that is required to make change activities a success. Change initiatives that are based on the assumption that those activities may be performed in the spare time, first whiter, then fail. The same is true for innovations. A worth reading article elaborates on this.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

7.11.05

Balanced Scorecard vs Intellectual Capital Reporting

J. Mouritsen (from the Copenhagen Business School) co-published a paper elaborating on the differences between the balanced scorecard and intellectual capital. Referring to my recent post about my impressions from the policy conference in Ferrara, I find this paper a valuable input for the discussion on intellectual capital issues.

This is, because the paper adds real value for the management if they have to decide or justify investments in either tool/model. The paper summarises the differences as:

There are interesting differences, however, because they differ in terms of strategy (competitive strategy versus competency strategy), of organisation (vertical versus lateral relations), of management (detailing versus visualising objectives), and of indicators (related causally versus bundled complementarily). Available balanced scorecards present a story about the firm’s budget, while available intellectual capital statements narrate the firm’s resources.

There might be disagreement with the specific findings of this comparison (for instance, I don’t see such a different approach to strategy as the authors: balanced scorecard -> based on Porter, intellectual capital -> based on the resource/knowledge-based view), however, this paper makes a contribution to the still ’spongy’ intellectual capital tools/models.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

6.11.05

Social Networks

Todays post about strategy as design has made me come across another article published by Jeanne Liedtka ’A practical guide to social networks’. It is a a HBR article and especially interests me since I co-ordinated a project proposal that had to do with social network analysis in a specific technology research group in Austria. The partner organisation was FAS research and we co-operated very well.

Back to Liedtka’s (et al) article, they classify social networks accordingly:
. Customized response
. Modular response
. Routine response

The argument is that collaborations need to be aligned with the strategic intent of networks. Only customized response networks need high external involvement and permeable boundaries. On the other hand, routine response networks are based on efficiency and process execution.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

4.11.05

When you enter an innovative organisation

Jim Carroll about 10 Signs that you’ve got an innovative climate in organisations. It should be pretty easy to walk into an organization and do an innovation audit — that is, assess the likelihood that an organization can do remarkably new and innovative things. Here’s what I would look for:

Ideas flow freely throughout the organization
. subversion is a virtue
. success and failure are championed
. there are many, many leaders who encourage innovative thinking, rather than managers who run a bureacracy
. there are creative champions throughout the organization — people who thrive on thinking about how to do things differently
. ideas get approval and endorsement
. rather than stating “it can’t be done,” people ask, “how could we do this?”
. people know that in addition to R&D, innovation is also about ideas about to “run the business better, grow the business and transform the business”
. the word “innovation” is found in most job descriptions as a primary area of responsibility, and a percentage of annual renumeration is based upon achievement of explicitly defined innovation goals

Good points, of course there is also the opposite list addressing ’innovation dysfunction’.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

2.11.05

Schroder experiment

Alison Thomas (from PricewaterhouseCoopers), spoke about a recent experiment conducted by PwC and Schroders involving the editing of a firm’s accounts (Coloplast). The experiment involved generating a new abridged, but statutory-compliant version of the accounts that omitted all of the quantified, non-financial data (which is intangible capital) that the firm chooses to report. The two versions of the report, the extensive original and the abridged version were subjected to separate review by separate Schroder investment teams with a task to develop a forecast of revenue and earnings for the next two years.

The experiment revealed interesting results. The group with the complete accounts was overwhelmingly in favour of buying the shares (60 per cent against 20 per cent), while 80 per cent of those who reviewed the abr idged version recommended the sale of the stock (against 40% in the group with the entire reports).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

16.10.05

Excellence networks, die Besten, High Potentials ...

Karin Bauer im Standard über die Entwicklung, dass Unternehmen (’ÖMV-Generaldirektor Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer will nur mit den Besten zusammenarbeiten’) und Universitäten (’Christoph Badelt, Rektor der Wiener Wirtschaftsuni (WU), diskutiert es seit geraumer Zeit laut: Eine gute, unternehmerische Uni muss sich ihre Studenten aussuchen können’) nur mit den ’Besten’ zusammenarbeiten wollen. Jedoch wurde bisher in keiner Diskussion hinterfragt, ob unser derzeitiges System überhaupt geeignet ist, die Besten auszuzeichnen.

Die Besten durch Schulabschlüsse oder Universitätsabchlüsse zu filtern ist meiner Meinung nach falsch, denn:
. in der Schulzeit spielt die persönliche Entwicklung eine große Rolle. Wenn einer zufällig ein halbes Jahr oder ein Jahr ’weiter entwickelt’ ist, dann hat er am Stichtag (Zeugnis) die besseren Noten. Dies soll dann ausschlaggebend für den weiteren Bildungsweg sein? Ich bin schon auf amerikanische (oder japanische) Verhältnisse gespannt, wo bereits im Kindergarten ein enormer Leistungsdruck herrscht. Und wenn das Klima für ein spielerischen Lernen fehlt, dann haben wir bestenfalls begabte Analysten aber sicherlich keine Schüler/Studenten, die aussergewöhnliches bewirken.
. Kreativität und Schulunterricht vertragen sich meist nicht, im Berufsleben wird aber immer öfter Kreativität verlangt. Diejenigen, die am schnellsten keine `Dummheiten’ machen (also keine neuen Dinge ausprobieren), haben die besten Chancen, gute Noten zu bekommen.
. es wird immer mehr für die Prüfung (oder den Professor) gelernt, und immer weniger für die persönliche Entwicklung. Um exzellente Noten zu bekommen, reicht es meist nicht, orginell und intelligent zu sein, sondern es muss auch auf die Vorlieben der Prüfer eingegangen werden. Es wird für die Prüfung, nicht aber für die eigene Entwicklung gelernt.

Wenn sich Unternehmen auf die Auswahl der angeblich (in dem beschriebenen Sinn) ’Besten’ beschränken, entgeht ihnen ein großes Potenzial an außergewöhnlichen Mitarbeitern. Besonders erfolgreiche Unternehmen werden nicht von exzellenter operativer Leistung (das ist mittlerweile Standard), sondern im viel stärken Ausmaß von einem ständigem Erneuern geprägt. Dafür brauchen die Unternehmen anders denkende, die vielen Organisationen fehlen werden.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

27.09.05

Unternehmen und Planungsprozesse

’Ein Drittel aller österreichischen Unternehmen ab drei Mio. Euro Jahresumsatz arbeitet ’planlos’, so das Ergebnis einer Umfrage der Bank Austria Creditanstalt (BA-CA) unter 508 heimischen Mittel- und Großbetrieben’ (orf.at). Weiters gaben diese Unternehmen die folgenden (gereihten) Unternehmensziele für die nächsten 2 Jahre an:
. Gewinnsteigerung
. Umsatzerhöhung
. Ausbau der Marktposition
. Steigerung des Cash-Flows
. Finanzstruktur

Unternehmen können durchaus sehr erfolgreich ohne dokumentierte Planung sein, jedoch findet meiner Erfahrung nach in jedem erfolgreichen Unternehmen Planung statt. Diese Planung muss nicht unbedingt formell sein, aber sie muss systematisch sein. Findet sich in einem erfolgreichen Unternehmen keine formellen Planungsprozesse, dann wird dies meist von einem sehr guten Unternehmensleiter (meist der Gründer) ohne Dokumentation durchgeführt. Dies kann wunderbar funktionieren, solange diese Person im Unternehmen die Führungsposition innehat. Bei vielen Betriebsübergaben oder -übernahmen wird diese augenscheinliche Planungslosigkeit jedoch zum Verhängnis.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

18.08.05

SImons’ model explains the difficulties between managers and engineers

A few days ago, I wrote about Simons’ four spans of any job. As a quick reminder, Simons argues that in order to target high performance, any job or business unit must be in line with firstly the business’s strategy and secondly, the four spans must be balanced.

He then gives settings of the spans for a marketing and sales manager at a well-known company that develops and sells complex software for large corporate clients: ’The span of control for this job is quite narrow. As the manager stated, To do my day-to-day job, I depend on sales, sales consulting, competency groups, alliances, technical support, corporate marketing, field marketing, and integrated marketing communications. None of these functions reports to me, and most do not even report to my group. The span of accountability, by contrast, is wide. The manager is accountable, along with others throughout the business, for revenue growth, profit, and customer satisfaction — measures that require responsiveness and a willingness to make many trade-offs.’

Obviously, the span of influence is set wider than the span of control. To get things done, he has to ’cross boundaries and convince people in other units (whom he cannot command) to help him. So that the manager receives the help he needs, the CEO works hard to ensure that the job’s span of support is wide.’ I think this description explains very well the inherent difficulties sales managers and software developer often have: the sales manager can only be successful when an ethos of mutual responsibilities with shared goals, strong group identification and trust has benn build. However, this desirable setting mostly doesn’t exist. Rather, software engineers and sales managers don’t understand and respect each other, so that both fail in delivering consistent customer-satisfaction.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.08.05

Peak performers

Thomas A. Steward and Julia Kirby (both editors of Harvard Business Review) investigating the attributes of peak performers. They approach the topic from the individual, the team and the organisation. Starting with the first one, Prof Quinn is being cited for showing that great leaders must be authentic, rather than imitating someone else (which is done in most leadership seminars: identify attributes of great leaders and teach them for imitation). Further, Prof Simons argue that the approach on selecting the right person for a position doesn’t lead to excellence. It is the position itself that is structured for high performance. Simons advise managers to design a job along the following four spans that characterise a job:
. control
. accountability
. influence
. support

Shifting to high performing teams, the authors mention both practitioners and academics. According to them those high performers show the following key characteristics:
. create stable teams, reduce turnover (Hillmann, deputy chief of the LA police department)
. a ’certain kind of person’, in other words big-ego experts tackling ambitious projects; they ’are fundamentally different from the garden-variety groups that most organisations from to pursue more modest goals’ (Bill Fischer from IMD)
. allow them to operate differently from the typical consensus-oriented, task-focused teams
. combine noble goals and time pressure

Obviously, drivers for high performance at the corporate level are most difficult to identify, since issues are becoming more complex. However, some common characteristics can be highlighted:
. focus on execution (close the gap between strategy and performance)
. focus on learning. The US Army’s Opposing Force (Opfor) is a highly successful brigade that - although being out-numbered and out-equipped - always wins. Their source of success is based on a debriefing cycle that is fed back into the execution again and again, until highly valuable lessons have been learnt.
. keep the momentum going. This is not an automatic process, neither a virtuous circle. Quite often, performance peters out. This corresponds very much with what Miller termed Icarus paradox.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

3.08.05

Risk management

The Open University Business School chaired a discussion between Philip Thomas, Director of Risk Management at Bass plc (a UK brewing and leisure group) and Paul Hopkin, Head of Risk Management for the BBC.

Thomas explained the process at Bass: a bubble chart is created representing the business, then senior management annotate key risks in a structured brain storming session to establish a risk map. At first, risks for the entire organisation are established, at a second step, individual risks are identified. According to Thomas, key is to keep it simple. One of the main questions is: what needs to be done to improve management risks?

Hopkin from BBC agreed with Thomas, however, he added some additional points. He argued about the timescale of different risks (namely strategic, project and operational) which in his view had to be determined before hand. This should result in the opportunity that within a brain storming session, senior management is aware of the different time frame. After the brain storming session (and risk identification), a long list is produced which then has to be short listed (prioritised) in order to establish the organisational risk profile. When prioritising, the key criteria are the following:
. what is the likely impact of the risk (how, medium, low)
. what is the likely probability of the risk (how, medium, low)
. what about the timing when risks may cristalize

Finally, this should lead to areas of improvements, that address the question: what is your level of confidence is existing measures?

Although, the two approaches differ slightly, both managers agree that:
. risk management should be part of managers’ routine (each day of work)
. risk management is an appropriate tool to consolditate management’s view as to those areas that needs to be pushed forward
. it is vital to be honest to oneself and question existing measures regularly
. it is not about policy, but about action: identify key actions, since organisations are not able to cover all risks; this is appreciated by senior management.
. sometimes senior management doesn’t want to discuss some risk; however, the risk mapping process showed them all risks so that they had to respond to them.

For BBC, one of the benefits of risk mapping was the insight that some risks were overmanaged (for instance, safety risks).

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

2.08.05

Implementation shortcomings

Lucy Kellaway writes (in ’Sense and Nonsense in the office’) about the volatile position of a CEO: ’The average stay at the top of the FTSE 100 companies is four years, and falling’ … thus ’failed executives must be one of the fastest growing socio-economic groups in the Western world’. However, more interesting, she also argues about the reasons for failures: ’the reason has nothing to do with shortcomings in strategy, vision, or any of the supposedly difficult stuff … the reason they screw up is that they cannot implement.’

My focus regarding business consulting is on implementation although this covers of course many other thematic issues such as strategy or innovation. Nevertheless the difficulties experienced by CEOs, consultants focusing on implementation are rare, since this is (seemingly) dead dull. I don’t think so and concentrating on the nitty-gritty is effective indeed.

In a recent McKinsey release, Alan G. Lafley - CEO of P&G, more than five years (!) - has been interviewed. He highlighted the importance of excellence in execution: ’Bossidy’s right—in the end, it’s about executing with excellence. But you can exhort all you want about excellent execution; you’re not going to get it unless you have disciplined strategic choices, a structure that supports the strategy, systems that enable large organizations to work and execute together, a winning culture, and leadership that’s inspirational. If you have all that, you’ll get excellent execution.’

You may wish to leave a from your own site.

15.07.05

Parallen Weinbau und Management

Über den Film Mondovino von Jonathan Nossiter kann man geteilter Meinung sein (die Spannung sackt zum Ende hin zunehmend ab), aber dennoch schafft Nossiter die Vermittlung eines Selbstbildnisses der internationalen Weinbauszene (oder zumindest einiger Persönlichkeiten). Während ich mir den Film angesehen habe, taten sich einige Parallelen zu gutem und richtigen (wie Malik Effektivität und Effizienz umschreibt) Management auf. Der erste Punkt betrifft die Bedeutung des Terroirs (Terrain). Weinbauern mit langjähriger Erfahrung und Zeit zur Reflektion (z.B. Aimé Guibert aus dem Languedoc, Hubert de Montille in Volnay und Pommard in Burgund, Battista Columbu aus Bosa (Sardinien), wo der seltene Malvasia di Bosa kultiviert wird) erklären, dass Terroir der wichtigste Bestandteil von charaktervollem Wein ist. Es hat auch einen Grund warum unterschiedliche Trauben an unterschiedlichen Orten geplanzt wurden und werden. Wenn seit einigen Jahrzenten der weltweit führende Weiningenieur Michel Rolland (Pomerol, Frankreich) von Weingut zu Weingut pendelt, dann ist ihm Terroir ziemlich egal. Hauptsache die neueste Technologie kommt zum Einsatz, um einen Wein herzustellen, der seinem ’internationalen’ Geschmack entspricht. Terroir kann in Unternehmen als unterer Teil des bekannten Eisbergmodells gesehen werden. Unternehmenskultur, Unternehmenswerte, Mitarbeiterkompetenzen etc, die mittlerweile über 80% am Unternehmen-Gesamtvermögen ausmachen, sind hauptverantwortlich für die Schaffung von Unternehmenswert. Das schließt an meinen gestrigen Kommentar an.

Ein weiterer Punkt betrifft die falsche Vorstellung, dass komplexe Situation (wie sie sowohl im Weinbau als auch im Management dauernd vorkommen) mit den immer gleichen Methoden bzw. Werkzeugen gelöst werden können. Die Management-Literatur ist voll von neuen, alles lösenden Managementwerkzeugen, jedoch sollten Führungskräfte nicht auf diese Versuchungen reinfallen. Rolland’s Methodenmix von neuen technologischen Methoden, Eichenfässer, die Vanillegeschmack liefern und Mikro-Oxyidation werden überall blind angewandt. Das ergebnis sind charakterlose, einheitliche Weine. Dies alleine stellt noch kein Problem dar. Gefährlich wird das aber, wenn diese Leute eine Machstellung im System innehaben, die ihnen das Benchmarking vom Leibe hält. Wenn alle den gleichen Blödsinn machen, z.B. im Management operative und strategische Themen verwechseln, bzw. sich nur mehr auf operative Aktivitäten konzentrieren (Qualitätsmanagement, JIT etc), dann fehlt die Referenz. Rolland und Robert Parker haben eine Vormachtstellung im Wein-Konsumverhalten, so dass andere Weinerzeuger nur Marktnischen füllen können. Diese Vormachtstellung trifft man natürlich auch im Management-Consulting Bereich, man braucht sich nur die namhaften Consulter ansehen, wie sie von Managementtrends die letzten Jahre begleitet wurden.

Dies führt zum letzten Punkt (eigentlich gäbe es hierzu noch viel mehr zu schreiben). Schlechtes und falsches Management, ebenso wie schlechte und falsche Vinifizierung, setzt sich auf Dauer nicht durch. In meinem Bekanntenkreis wird viel Wert auf charaktervolle Weine gelegt, Neal Rosenthal ist ein Einzelkämpfer in New York. Im Management dasselbe, nicht richtige Werkzeuge und Methoden können Ergebnisse vortäuschen, aber Unternehmenswert wird damit nicht aufgebaut, sondern zerstört. Management-Consulting kann niemals auf ein Werkzeug alleine aufbauen. Auch meist nicht auf ein Modell. Dieses Modell kann als Grundlage für verschiedene Unternehmen dienen, jedoch muss auf die individuelle Situation eines jeden Unternehmens reagiert werden. Dies ist viel Arbeit, die jedoch - richtig ausgeführt - den erfolgreichen Fortbestand des Unternehmens sichert.

You may wish to leave a from your own site.